Allemond v. Talos

A welder on an offshore platform, a conductor pipe that would not hold still, a strap called a come-along, seven warnings in one morning, and a fingertip.

The rule

The platform sat on the Outer Continental Shelf off Louisiana, so the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act borrowed the law of the adjacent state: “OCSLA therefore requires us to apply Louisiana law to this dispute to the extent no inconsistency with federal law arises.” Under that law, “[t]o recover for damages caused by a defective thing, a plaintiff must prove” that the thing was in the defendant’s custody, that it “contained a defect that presented an unreasonable risk of harm to others,” that the defective condition caused the damage, and that the defendant knew or should have known of the defect. Whether a risk is unreasonable is answered by a four-factor test: “the utility of the complained-of condition,” “the likelihood and magnitude of harm, including the obviousness and apparentness of the condition,” “the cost of preventing the harm,” and “the nature of the plaintiff’s activities in terms of social utility or whether the activities were dangerous by nature.” The court reviews a summary judgment de novo, and “[r]eversal is required if the record reveals a genuine dispute of material fact.”

The facts

The plaintiff was an employee of Acadian Contractors, which had a contract to provide welding services to QuarterNorth Energy. The job was the decommissioning of the defendants’ oil and gas platform. “A conductor pipe is the casing on the outside of a casing string,” and on this platform “a conductor pipe was moving and needed to be secured”; besides the welding, the work included “placing a heavy-duty strap called a ‘come-along’ on the conductor to reduce its movement,” which the welder had evidence he did not install, select or inspect, and the welder’s role “was to weld support braces to add to the stability of the conductor.” The workers “were told that rough seas were coming in,” and they understood that this meant the conductor was at risk of moving. On the morning of March 30, 2024, he was advised, “by our count at least, seven times,” orally and in writing, to avoid pinch points through his hand and finger placement, in words like “Be aware of hand placement. Keep fingers out of pinch points.” During the work “he placed his left hand on the first stabilizer he had just welded into place; when the conductor moved, it pinched his left index finger, amputating his fingertip.” He sued in July 2024 in the Southern District of Texas. After discovery the defendants moved for summary judgment, and in November 2025 the district court granted it in what the panel called a detailed opinion.

The holding

Affirmed, factor by factor. On utility the welder argued that a malfunctioning conductor had no social utility; the panel answered, “We find no relevance to that fact,” and pointed to its own precedent that some component parts of a platform are “basic and essential” and that platforms are structures with “obvious social and economic benefits.” On the likelihood and obviousness of the harm he argued that he was not subjectively aware the conductor could still move once the come-along was on, because his welding visor was on and he could not see it; the panel allowed that it “may be” so, “but the evidence is that he was told prior to the work: ‘Be aware of hand placement. Keep fingers out of pinch points.’ A pinch point is what, unfortunately, caused the injury.” On the cost of prevention he listed five measures, among them a more specific identification of pinch points and a second come-along, “[b]ut at summary judgment, Allemond provided no evidence about the costs, the practicality, or other details about these additional measures.” On the nature of his own activity the panel noted that he was “an experienced welder who had previously worked on offshore platforms” who had done this task before, had been reminded of the hazard seven times and knew rough seas were coming, and closed the factor with the sentence to keep: “Ultimately, however, Allemond was injured by the very condition he was hired to repair.” Then the court’s conclusion: “It is not unreasonably dangerous for an unstable conductor to move as the welder hired to remedy that defect attempts to stabilize it,” and “[t]he fact that a repairman is, at the time of the incident, subjectively unaware of a risk which extensive experience has prepared the repairman for does not change our analysis. That is especially true in this case where the repairman was reminded of that risk seven times before the accident occurred.” He was “presumptively cognizant” of the risks and “able to minimize them,” and that left no genuine dispute of material fact on the unreasonable-risk element. The second theory, that the owner was liable because it exercised operational control over the contractors through a project manager and a man on the platform described as his eyes and ears, never reached the merits: “In district court, there was no argument that the defendants exercised operational control over these contractors,” the court “cannot consider” such arguments unless evidence and argument on the issue were given to the district court, and so “[t]he issue of operational control is forfeited.”

Why it matters

Three things for anyone who works, or works up a case, on the water. First, the law that applies to an injury on a fixed platform on the Outer Continental Shelf is the law of the adjacent state, to the extent it does not conflict with federal law, and Louisiana’s risk-utility test weighs four things: the utility of the condition, how likely and how obvious the harm was, what preventing it would have cost, and what the plaintiff was there to do. A worker who was hired to fix the dangerous thing, and warned about it that morning, starts that balance behind, and the court will treat his experience as knowledge even where his visor was on. Second, the cost-of-prevention factor is proof, not argument. A plaintiff who says the job could have been done more safely has to put in the record what the safer method was, what it would have cost and whether it was practical, which is the work an Expert exists to do, and it has to be in the record before the summary judgment ruling, not described for the first time on appeal. Third, operational control, the usual path to an owner’s liability for an independent contractor’s worker, has to be raised in the district court, with evidence and argument, in the response to the summary judgment motion if that is where the case is decided. The Fifth Circuit will not take it up for the first time on appeal, and the same discipline applies in Texas, where a property owner is not liable to a contractor’s employee who constructs, repairs, renovates or modifies an improvement to real property, including for an unsafe workplace, unless it “exercises or retains some control over the manner in which the work is performed, other than the right to order the work to start or stop or to inspect progress or receive reports” and “had actual knowledge of the danger or condition” and failed to adequately warn (Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 95.003), the bar Competent Person and The Fall have described from the Texas side. Hunter Marine Group v. Gonzalez is the court’s other recent word on who answers for an injured offshore worker, and Hill v. Jackson Offshore on where the case is heard.

Allemond v. Talos QN Exploration, L.L.C., No. 25-20567 (5th Cir. Oct. 9, 2026) (per curiam; Jones, Southwick and Duncan, JJ.; unpublished), from the Southern District of Texas, No. 4:24-CV-2560, applying Louisiana law through OCSLA. Read from the opinion. Analyzed here for the lawyering, not the politics. This is general information, not legal advice.